Other writers and directors may have more work on show in Edinburgh,
but John McGrath is positioned proudly at both extremes of the festival
spectrum. On the Fringe, The Last Of The MacEachans (Theatre Workshop)
is the latest, and among the best, of the small-scale solo pieces McGrath
has created with his partner Elizabeth MacLennan: a middle-aged Highland
woman comments sadly upon the external forces debilitating her homeland
– Home Counties incomers, families sundered by emigration, even the rewriting
of national history in the video of Braveheart she is watching.

In the International Festival, McGrath has created a raucous, sprawling
behemoth of an "update" to Scotland's greatest play, Sir David Lyndsay's
Ane
Satyre Of The Thrie Estaitis. Four centuries on, McGrath is most concerned
with the new fourth estate, the "Meeja". His arch-villain is the Australian
multi-national, multi-media baron Lord Merde (with every mention his name
followed by an ejaculatory "Och!"). He and his minions are intent on grabbing
their own slice of a new Scotland and compromising the fine intentions
of King Humanity as he returns to a land now free.

As Lyndsay wrote of a country on a hopeful threshold (just as James
V ascended the throne), McGrath anticipates an at least autonomous Scotland
thanks to the promises of "Saviour Blair". His idealism is unashamed –
roles for the human virtues and a real place for the currently dispossessed
underclass – nor does he balk at espousing socialist values without an
emasculatory "New" attached thereto. His bile at media consumerism is unrestrained
and informed by lengthy personal experience, and often his ire runs away
with him: the London mediocracy may well find such sustained invective
against an easy target grows tedious. But satire's teeth feel sharper in
a more compact society where targets are more immediate – and Scotland's
own media princeling, Gus MacDonald, is the subject of several sideswipes.

Moreover, although McGrath's verse sometimes veers into doggerel, it
carries a fearsome energy. The plot itself – in which Merde's minions try
but fail to divert Humanity from his avowed path – takes up only the second
half of the evening, after a long and chaotic prologue in which the estates
are introduced and the audience warmed up by Sylvester McCoy's cheerfully
bonkers Grandfather Jock. Close-range references fly around with gay abandon
(even Robert Lepage's cancellation merits a couplet), songs are inserted
in keeping with the preferred strategy of David MacLennan's Wildcat company,
and the plot is resolved not by any named character but by the intervention
of a chorus-line ex machina of Highland-Riverdancing girls.

The show is deliberately sited in Edinburgh's new conference centre,
a shrine to the demonic forces against which McGrath rails. High culture
it is not, nor possessed of any of the supposed qualities of a well made
play. It dares to be hopeful, politically passionate and bursting with
a vitality which above all is gloriously human. Its like may not be seen
again for some time: the Scottish Arts Council's recent decision to convert
its theatrical funding from a revenue to a franchise basis will effectively
preclude the likes of Wildcat from embarking on such a project again.